S.F. property owner can’t give land away for affordable housing

The house on Amber Drive in Diamond Heights, above, is owned by Mischa Selig man, left, seen at his home in Santa Barbara. Seligman promised his mother he would donate the property in San Francisco for affordable housing. So far, he has found no nonprofit devel oper willing to take it on.

The house on Amber Drive in Diamond Heights, above, is owned by...

At a time when developers of affordable housing are desperate for land on which to build, Mischa Seligman has the opposite problem.

The Santa Barbara resident owns a 6,500-square-foot patch of land at 36 Amber Drive in San Francisco’s Diamond Heights. He would like to donate it for affordable housing and has hired an architect to draw up plans that could add 14 single-room-occupancy units to the property. But after two years of searching, Seligman has been unable to find a nonprofit housing builder willing to take both ownership of the eucalyptus-shaded land and guarantee the units will remain permanently affordable.

“I’m in fairly good condition for my age, but I’m beginning to feel my Second World War vintage,” he said.

Seligman’s inability to find a development partner exposes a weakness in the city’s affordable housing infrastructure, observers say. With limited resources to spend on such housing, agencies like Mayor’s Office on Housing is focused on large infill projects that can generate more than 100 units and are more efficient to build.

“Even with free land and a very willing public lender, it’s difficult to figure out how to make a project on a small site economically feasible at deeply affordable rents,” said affordable housing consultant Scott Falcone, who has been working on the Amber Drive project.

The idea of developing affordable housing on the parcel goes back 40 years to Seligman’s mother, Maria “Mitzi” Kolisch, who bought the land in the early 1950s. Kolisch lived in the small cottage on the property and built an art studio next door. At the time, Diamond Heights was rolling grassland — the property had once housed a horse-rental business.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

The house on Amber Drive in Diamond Heights is owned by Mischa Seligman, who is trying to donate the property.

The house on Amber Drive in Diamond Heights is owned by Mischa...

Circle of noted friends

Kolisch was an artist, political activist and medical researcher whose circle of close friends included chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling, artist Ruth Asawa, inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller, and photographer Imogen Cunningham. The house was their hangout. When the city tried to take her property as part of a large redevelopment project that was approved in 1955 and started in 1961, Kolisch “fought like a tiger to keep it and prevailed,” Seligman said.

In the late 1960s she drew up plans to build housing for low-income youth, but wasn’t able to implement them before she died in 1987. Today there is a tenant living in the cottage, but the studio is vacant. Seligman’s plan would preserve both structures.

Initially, Seligman hoped the American Friends Service Committee, an affiliate of the Quaker Church, would undertake the project. That group passed but suggested Conard House, which provides housing and services to adults with mental health conditions.

Conard House spent over a year analyzing the project — which would cost more than $4 million — and looking for funding. It was willing to accept possession of the land, but was uncomfortable with the legally binding deed restriction that would keep it affordable.

In a January 2015 letter, Conard House Executive Director Richard Heasley offered a deal under which Seligman would “place the property in our hands, trusting that our board will honor your restrictions.”

Seligman found the commitment insufficient.

“‘Trust us’ is not good enough,” he said. “I don’t think that the strings we have attached are unreasonable. I think they are legitimate strings.”

Don Falk, executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., said nonprofits like his and Mercy Housing are expert at financing and building dense infill projects in central neighborhoods, but aren’t equipped to tackle smaller parcels.

“I wish it were the kind of thing we could do,” Falk said. “Free land is nothing to sneeze at.”

The difficulty of financing small affordable housing projects in residential neighborhoods is one of the reasons the vast majority of those projects are built closer to downtown in mixed neighborhoods.

A recent report on housing balance in San Francisco showed that about 60 percent of affordable units are built in District Six, which includes the Tenderloin, Mission Bay and the South of Market. While it’s been decades since affordable units were built in Diamond Heights, the neighborhood of 2,500 has a surprising amount of below-market housing — about 660 units, most of which were built with federal money in the 1960s and ’70s.

‘Always use more’ housing

The neighborhood, which borders Glen Park, Noe Valley, Twin Peaks and the Castro, is known for its Joseph Eichler-developed houses and its churches, parks, quiet tree-lined streets, and Safeway-anchored suburban-style strip mall.

“We have a lot of affordable housing and could always use more,” said Betsy Eddy, president of the Diamond Heights Community Association. “There is not much development up here. It’s pretty stable. A lot of the people who moved here in the 1960s and 1970s are still here.”

Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents the neighborhood, said mixing in affordable housing is a good idea. “To meet our affordable housing goals, in addition to larger projects we also need smaller projects spread throughout the city,” he said. “These smaller projects ensure better geographic equity and integration of affordable housing with the surrounding neighborhood.”

Seligman’s architect, David Tucker, said the shingled project would fit into the surrounding neighborhoods, with two stories of living above parking spaces, and back patios. He has been waiting until an owner is found before filing an application with the city.

Photo: Kendrick Brinson

Mischa Seligman gave his mother his word that he would help have their land in Diamond Heights donated and preserved for good use. He is seen in his home in Santa Barbara.

Mischa Seligman gave his mother his word that he would help have...

“Mischa has been trying to do this for many years and getting nowhere,” Tucker said. “It is amazing. It seems to be the ideal time to get rid of his property. I can appreciate that it’s a risk, but on the other hand whoever ends up with it is getting a lot. I don’t see how it could go wrong if they are in the business of affordable housing — it’s not like they are trying to make a profit on it.”

Seligman and Tucker have been working with affordable housing consultant Scott Falcone and talking to the Mayor’s Office on Housing about eventually funding a development.

Healsey of Conard House said he still hopesthe project will come together, though he expects that city financing for the project would not come through before 2019.

“We are not the only ones in the pipeline. There are a couple of dozen projects stuck in the pipeline. What can you do?”

No response from tech titans

Meanwhile, Seligman — who has lived in Southern California for most of his life and rarely gets to San Francisco — has written to a pair of tech moguls, Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, to see if they would be interested in getting into the affordable housing business.

“Of course, there was no response from either of them whatsoever,” he said.